In a recent press release, the BBC promised that its new legal drama series Silk would present a true-to-life portrait of a female barrister applying for QC or "silk".

On the big screen female lawyers have not fared all that well in representing their real-life counterparts, despite similar promises from Hollywood. This was especially true in the 1980s and 1990s, when female stars were cast almost obsessively as lawyers: Glenn Close in Jagged Edge (1985), Cher in Suspect (1987), Jessica Lange in Music Box (1989), Barbara Hershey in Defenseless (1991) , Susan Sarandon in The Client (1994), and Julia Roberts as a law student in The Pelican Brief (1993), an assistant US attorney in Conspiracy Theory (1997), and a legal assistant in Erin Brokovich (2000) – to name just a few.

These Hollywood lawyers are women in or just beyond their 30s and dismally aware of time's passing as they labour at their desks or sometimes in their beds – with piles of legal briefs rather than lovers lying next to them at night. All are single, unhappily so, or divorced. Some are passionate, excessively so, in a profession that demands rational balance. Others are rigidly rational, tipping the balance again.

Why are these seemingly well-educated, intelligent, attractive, and potentially powerful women of the law presented as personally unfulfilled and professionally deficient? And why do they abound in American movies of the 1980s and 1990s?

Hollywood's production of so many female lawyer films, it would seem, answered a feminist call for women in central, positive, professional roles at a time when men dominated those positions onscreen. The films also allowed the industry to demonstrate its currency with larger cultural trends. After facing decades of discrimination, women accounted for more than a third of US law students by the mid-1980s, and by 2000, more than half of all US law students were women.

At the same time, the conservative New Right took hold with the election of Ronald Reagan to the presidency for two terms (1981-1989), followed by George HW Bush for one term (1989-1993) – years marked by backlash responses to feminist gains and by rhetoric stressing family values. Appointing Sandra Day O'Connor as the first woman justice of the US supreme court, Reagan strategically appeared to support equal rights for women, while positioning the conservative O'Connor to advance his own aims.

Films about female lawyers of the period adopted a similar strategy. They gave the nod to liberal feminist politics through stories featuring women lawyers, yet they also exercised strategies of containment in response to women potentially gaining genuine power within the law, one of the most staunchly patriarchal of institutions.

Whether falling in love with their murderous clients, such as in Jagged Edge, or compromising their professional objectivity in the legal defence of a father or a surrogate son in Music Box and The Client, respectively, the cracker-jack female defence attorneys pose a threat to the proper functioning of the law.

These films, like so many others of the period, "play it both ways", as film scholar Thomas Schatz has said of Hollywood genre films. Each story manages "to both criticise and reinforce the [culture's] values, beliefs, and ideals."

By contrast the Irish/UK production, In the Name of the Father (1993), more coherently indicts the justice system itself, in its narrative about the trial of the Guildford Four. Famed civil rights attorney Gareth Peirce, played by Emma Thompson, defeats the corrupt magistrates by means of the very system they govern and uphold. Unlike most Hollywood films, this one exposes a failure of the legal system rather than a failure of the female lawyer who is forced to negotiate within this system, already organised to displace her.

The BBC describes actor Maxine Peake's barrister in Silk as "in her 30s, single, passionate". Although the adjectives echo traits of the Hollywood female lawyer, writer Peter Moffat, also behind Criminal Justice and North Square and a former barrister himself, claims the series will "tell it as it really is". Hopefully that commitment to realism will extend beyond plot and action to the representation of the female barrister as she navigates the many trials of the legal system.

• Cynthia Lucia is author of Framing Female Lawyers: Women on Trial in Film, director of film and media studies at Rider University in New Jersey and film review editor of Cineaste magazine.